A U.S. Forest Service official recently vowed that the agency will expand the scope of timber projects on national forests. The agency expects the scope of the largest projects to increase from roughly 30,000 acres to about 500,000 acres, said Tony Tooke, associate deputy chief of the national forest system.

“This idea of scale is proven to work,” Tooke said at the recent annual conference of the American Forest Resource Council. “Planning, implementing and monitoring on a broader scale just makes sense,” he said.

The Forest Service is aiming for a “landscape” approach in the environmental studies required for forest treatments, Tooke said. More than 70 million acres of the national forest system needs restoration work, which includes thinning and fire prevention, he said. About 3.1 million board feet of timber are expected to be harvested from national forests this year, up from 2.4 million board feet in 2011, Tooke said.

The agency is studying the root causes of lawsuits against its projects and developing strategies to deal with them, he said. “We know we have litigation issues,” said Tooke. For example, Forest Service officials try to develop a consensus with environmental and timber interests during the project planning phase, he said.

“What this comes down to at the end of the day is getting more work done,” he said. The agency also aims to increase the amount of stewardship contracts, under which timber companies agree to conduct restoration work in addition to logging, Tooke said.